PAOLI, PASQUALE. - Corsican patriot, b. at La Stretta di Morosaglia on 26 Apr. 1725, d. in London on 5 Feb. 1807. At the age of fourteen, after subduing an isolated revolt against the Republic of Genoa, he followed his father, Giacinto, into exile in Naples, where he attended the schools of the most renowned masters. In 1741 he entered the Bourbon army in the “Corsica” regiment, composed almost entirely of Corsicans. He always maintained contact with the leading Corsicans, and when elected supreme head of the nation, he returned to the island and resumed the struggle against the Genoese government, gradually wresting from it all the inland regions until only the fortified coastal points remained. Then he had a body of laws worthy of a free people approved by the National Consultation, promoted agriculture, and founded the University of Corte, summoning to teach there Corsican masters of proven worth belonging to religious orders.
In 1760, as the war with the Republic of Genoa continued and ecclesiastical discipline remained in disarray, P. asked Clement XIII for an apostolic visitor; and one was sent in the person of Msgr. Crescenzio De Angelis, bishop of Segni. The Genoese government placed a price on the head of the papal envoy, but to no avail. In 1767 P. granted generous hospitality in the island to the Jesuits expelled from Spain and America.
The following year Genoa ceded possession of Corsica to France; P. protested and for about a year held out against the more powerful enemy; but after the rout at Ponte Nuovo (10 May 1769) he had to surrender and take refuge in London. In 1790, at the outset of the French Revolution, he was able to return home and was named president of the departmental administration. In the first two years he followed the directives of the government in Paris; but then, unable in conscience to assent to the excesses of the Jacobin Party and the National Convention, he was suspended from his duties and summoned to answer before the Assembly. Instead, he organized a new local government and sought aid and protection from the British government, offering King George sovereignty over the island. Having failed to obtain the hoped-for position of viceroy, disappointed, he set out for his final exile in London, where he lived honored and esteemed by all.
PAULINUS, patriarch of Aquileia, saint. - B. in the Lombard Duchy of Friuli in the first half of the 8th century, d. at Cividale on 11 Jan. 802. As a master of grammar, well versed in Virgil and Ovid, Sedulius and Boethius, he was summoned by Charlemagne after 774 to the Palatine School in France and formed a friendship with Alcuin and the other members of that circle. On 17 June 776 Charles made him a donation of property confiscated from rebel Lombards at Ivrea, and in 787 named him patriarch of Aquileia. P. played a major role in the events of those years, above all in the struggle against the Adoptionist errors of Elipandus of Toledo and Felix of Urgel.
He took part in the Council of Regensburg (792) and in the more solemn Council of Frankfurt in 794, for which he wrote the *Libellus sacrosolubus contra Elipandum*; at Charles’s invitation he composed in 799–800 the *Libri III contra Felicem* (of which A. Wilmart presented a new arrangement in his *L’ordre des parties dans le traité de Paulin d'Aquile contra Felix d'Urgel*, in *The Journal of Theological Studies*, 39 [1938], no. 153, pp. 22–37). A *Liber exhortatorius* of ascetic character he addressed to his friend Eric, duke of Friuli. As a conclusion to Charlemagne’s wars against the Avars in 791–96, P., together with Arno (v.), archbishop of Salzburg, took part in the Danube conference to provide for the conversion of those peoples. Then, in the hoped-for year 796, he held a provincial council at Cividale in which he proposed an explanation of the Creed, dealt with the question of the *Filioque*, and issued fourteen important reforming canons. P. was fond of displaying the rhetorical artifices of the schools of his time, with affected language, striking images, and magniloquent phrases; he knew classical metrics and employed it, albeit with frequent liberties.
Around 798 he compiled a
PAULINUS, patriarch of Aquileia, saint — Fragment of the sepulchral inscription of P. — Cividale, Duomo.
PAULINUS of Nola, saint. - B. in Bordeaux in 352, d. at Nola on 22 June 431. He completed his studies in rhetoric at Bordeaux under distinguished masters, among them the poet Ausonius, to whom he remained bound by affectionate friendship. Thanks to his talents, great wealth, and numerous connections, he pursued a successful political career: he was consul in 378 and governor of Campania in 379.
But P., like Prudentius, was drawn rather to the contemplative life and sought to give his heart solace for his vivid sense of life’s fleetingness and the futility of earthly things. He therefore distributed his vast patrimony to the poor and lived in prayer and penance, in chaste union with his wife Therasia, first in Spain and then at Nola near the tomb of his patron St Felix, for whom he erected a basilica with the remainder of his wealth. He also abandoned, to Ausonius’s great disappointment (who had placed many hopes in the young disciple), all profane literary activity in order to direct his muse to the single purpose of his life: the celebration of Christianity. Ordained bishop in 409, he carried out his apostolate with the utmost zeal until his death.
P. occupies a position of considerable importance in the history of ancient Christian poetry, for he contributed to the assimilation of classical literature, which in the 5th century was brought to bear even by those poets, like P., who saw in it only an enemy to be fought.
Now averse to the art of the rhetoricians and the fictions of the poets, which “fill the heart with vain and lying things,” he wished to give poetry “truth” as its content, that is, the search for God, and set himself the goal of “instructing men’s hearts with sweetness,” harmonizing his art with the word of God as “the sole arbiter and shaper of all harmony.”
Despite theoretical errors, chiefly due to the old prejudice that separated form from content, P. occupies a very notable place as a Christian poet: his native, simple piety, his enchanted faith in the supernatural, his trembling abandonment to Christ in fear of the afterlife, his lofty spirit of love and charity give his verses a flowing and limpid intimacy that is lacking even in the greatest of the poets of ancient Latin Christianity.
The fifty letters, the only documentation of P.’s activity as a prose writer, are of lively historical interest, being sent for the most part to eminent figures “such as Augustine, Martin of Tours, Sulpicius Severus, etc.,” and rich in information on the religious and liturgical life of the time, though they do not compare with the Christian prose of Jerome and Augustine, who set such luminous examples.
Conversion, despite theoretical concerns, rendered P.’s poetic world more coherent and warmer: of this, the *Carmina natalicia*, which the poet composed from 395 onward to celebrate 14 January, the anniversary of the death of St Felix, are works of fresh and flowing poetry. They were written one each year, and there must therefore have been more than the 14 that survive (the last of these, according to Fabre, dates to 409), since P. continued until his death, which occurred in 431, to celebrate each year the life and miracles of the Saint, the splendor of the Basilica he himself had built, and the great gathering of festive people.
A varied work, rich in complex motifs, it carries the echo of sad and joyful events that unfolded in Italy at the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th century. Among other things, it conveys the fearful echo of the approach of the Goths and Alaric, and the great trust that the bishop placed in his Saint, who would certainly have saved Italy from the invaders, and who would have obtained from God, as narrated in the Old Testament, “to stop the sun and the moon” to allow the Romans to achieve their victory.
As for the other *Carmina*, goodness and sweetness prevail in the 10th and 11th, addressed in 410 to the master Ausonius, distressed by the abandonment of his disciple. Christ—writes P.—does not break affections, but renders them more sacred, since all human values acquire in Christ a depth unknown before.
(courtesy of the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti). Paulinus, Patriarch of Aquileia, Saint—St P. (on the right), detail of the gilded silver altarpiece, donated by Patriarch Pellegrino II (1193–1204)—Cividale, Duomo.
*Regula fidei* in 151 hexameters and Alcuin makes mention of poetic works sent by him to the pagan world. Among the best of his poems is the *Propempticon* (Carm. 17), addressed to the Bishop of Remesiana, who had come from distant Serbia to the tomb of St Felix: the Sapphic strophes bend to sing, with composed fluidity rarely marred by awkwardness, the intimate sweetness of P.’s sentiments.
Even in the epithalamium for the wedding of Julian and Titia (Carm. 15), P. succeeds in Christianizing, without making the weight of artifice felt, the ancient pagan genre, naturally and spontaneously substituting for the ancient gods who protected marriages, for Cupid, Juno, and Venus, Christ, who had transformed the marital bond into a chaste source of piety and comforting spiritual peace.